Designing for Mobilizing Climate Emotion to Collective Action in High School Chemistry

• In Event: Climate Emotion, Agency, and Justice in Formal and Informal Settings

Abstract

Purpose. This study explores the processes in which minoritized students critically make sense of and mobilize their climate emotions to take action in a high school chemistry classroom. The questions that guide the analysis are:
What were the trajectories of student emotion throughout the five week long unit? How were the trajectories configured in activities, through the interplay of student identities, sense-making, and participation?
How does students’ emotion serve as a condition for students’ collective climate civic action?

Framework. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective on emotion (Holodynski, 2013; Ratner, 2000; Vea, 2022), we view emotion as sociocultural practice that is dynamically, interactively, and relationally shaped in contexts. From this perspective, we use emotional configurations–“situated and reciprocal interrelationships between feeling, conceptual sense-making, and practice that give emotion social meaning in the learning of individuals and collective” (Vea, 2022, p. 315)--as the unit of analysis. In addition, we attend to the political nature of emotional configuration, focusing on how emotion is shaped by norms, ideology, and power relations. Lastly, we attend to how emotion shapes political possibilities and opportunities for collective action (p. 315).

Methods. Employing a qualitative ethnographic case study approach (Holodynski, 2013), we explored students’ ‘guided emotion participation’ (Vea, 2022) in a five week long co-designed unit about chemical equilibrium. Students explored the quality of soils in their school garden, food production, and climate change and engaged in civic action projects to address an identified issue of importance.

Data Sources and Analysis.
Data was collected through observations, interviews, and artifact collection. To identify the trajectories of student emotion (RQ1), we first examined narrated emotions using ‘My Emotion Trajectory’ maps and interview transcripts. Next, we analyzed five teaching videos to document embodied emotions in activities. To understand the role of climate emotion in fostering civic action (RQ2), we identified key events from videos and transcripts, and analyzed emotional configurations focusing on students’ expressed feelings, sense-making, and practices of political action.

Findings.
Most students’ emotional trajectories shifted multiple times throughout the unit in response to their expanded understanding of and relationships with the land, community, and people, and participation in practice.
Students’ ideological sense-making, identities, and ‘affective stances’ (Philip et al., 2017) played important roles in shaping their trajectories. For example, Susan, a 11th grade Cambodian girl, who understood climate change from ecological perspectives, thoughts and feelings evolved throughout the unit from hopeful to sad, eventually expressing her empowerment through her team’s civic action project. In contrast, Robert, a 11th grade half Vietnamese and half Chinese male, maintained expressing his disappointment and skepticism (“eco-gaslighting”), reflecting his ideologies of industrialism, objectivity, and individualism in understanding climate change related issues.
With the use of a public emotion board, students were prompted to think “what actually concerns me about climate change” and be “exposed to other people’s concerns.” This emotion configuration fostered students to “turn [students’] worries into a project to spread awareness.” (Susan, exit interview)

Significance. This study advances the theorization of climate emotion as sociopolitical practices grounded in empirical investigation.

Authors

• Minjung Shin, University of California - Irvine

• Hosun Kang, University of California - Irvine

• Symone Gyles, University of California - Irvine

• Issac Li, University of California - Irvine